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IBM is working with developers to make applications portable
between 64bit Linux and its next-generation 64bit Unix operating
system, codenamed Monterey/64.

Miles Barel, IBM's program director for AIX and Monterey, said
this week that Big Blue is developing interfaces that would provide
binary and programming compatibility so that applications developed
for 64bit Linux could work on the Monterey platform.

IBM formed Project Monterey in October 1998 to make its AIX Unix
variant source code compatible with the Santa Cruz Operation's
Unixware offering before porting it to Intel's IA-64 processor. Big
Blue expects to ship Monterey/64 at the same time as Intel releases
its 64bit Itanium processor, which is due this autumn.

Barel said application portability between the 64bit operating
systems would be "key focus" for IBM. "It's the applications that
are important, not the operating system on which they run," he
said.

Analysts said the commitment would allow IBM to take advantage
of the work of Linux developers and put it still further ahead of
its competitors in embracing the open source operating system.

Chris Martin, an analyst at Xephon, said: "For independent
software vendors this is great because it means they only have to
write an application once. However, how useful this is depends on
the depth of the compatibility."

Martin explained that applications are usually optimised to run
on a particular platform and that there is a danger that
performance will take a severe hit if they are run on another
operating system.

"There have been various attempts at binary compatibility and
not many have succeeded," he said. "What you tend to get is the
lowest common denominator."

Barel added that it should be possible to run "many or most
applications," but admitted that initially there would be some
limitations.

Asked about how IBM would position Monterey against Linux, Barel
conceded that Linux could be as scalable as the vendor's own Unix
offerings but said he believed this would be at least five years
away. He said that scalability, volume and systems management
features present in IBM's Unix operating system, AIX, are still
missing from Linux.

In a separate development, Bull this week announced that it had
become the first company to have successfully ported and run the
64bit Unix operating system from Project Monterey on an 8-way
Itanium server.